Sprung

(Disclaimer: Tiffany has decided that, after 50 year of being known by the first half of her name, Tiff, she would like to spend the next 50 with the last half. So, in an endeavor to honor her wishes, I will be referring to her as Fanny. Please do not assume that I have entered into any new relationships based on this change in marital nomenclature. This is also an early warning that, in 2 years, I would prefer to be addressed as “Commodore”, a title I find befitting to my later years.)

*Lake Salinda, Indiana. Fanny and some chainsaw graffiti.*

(Disclaimer 2: this blog started out about one thing and turned into being about something else altogether. This happens to me more often than not when writing)

Manic spring. In North Carolina, you have to be careful while walking through the woods in early spring because something will bloom at you hard enough to knock you down. Bugs arrive by the busload like drunken tourists at the beach on spring break. Azaleas throw riotous colors around like feather boas at a disco and the weather gets as predictable as a drunk kitten. The calendar fills up with every manner of thing happening in town and forest. Trying to catch the neighbors gets as tricky as trying to find the first of the native orchids. 2024’s spring was doubly manic as Tiff turned her 50th birth-day into a birth-month and it feels like we’re barely gonna catch our breath before summer slaps us into a hammock next to a waterfall and forces a couple of stiff drinks down our throats.

Stella at Schoolhouse Falls, Panthertown

*Upper Whitewater Falls, Whitewater River, NC*

*Van camping with Tarot cards, a tired puppy, and some feet*

We’ve done a decent job of getting out on family hikes. With everyone on a slightly different work and school schedule, Wednesdays are our day to get out and see what western North Carolina has hidden in its labyrinth of mountainous gorges. As long as you are willing to brave the roads that twist around like a snake trying to scratch behind an ear it can’t find with a leg it doesn’t have, you can find places of singular beauty. Panthertown, Gorges State Park, the meandering Foothills trail; all provide an opportunity to see displays of spring’s careless splendor.

*Quizzical Pinto and the backyard azaleas*

This year we’ve added a small furry hiker to the mix. After I lost a doomed struggle against the acquisition of any additional mammals in the home, we found a puppy at the humane society who has integrated into our family as well as any impulsive, puddle-worshipping, stick-whittling, butterfly-chaser could. We named him Pinto for his odd swirl of brown, black, and white markings similar to the wild mustangs that Jude and I had been reading about, but also because he is small and often smells bad.

*Two parents experiencing the joy of no longer paying for medical school*

Arranging an alignment of planetary bodies was my latest attempt at satisfying the level of importance that Tiffany places on her birthday and I’m glad that everyone else enjoyed the eclipse as well, but I have no idea what I’m going to do for her next year. I may have to see if Jesus is finally ready to return and ask him rapture away the traffic for her commute to work and bake her a holy carrot cake himself. Although I feel like it might be unfair to the fate of Stella’s eternal soul when Jesus finds out that her recipe is better than his.

*64 biscuits and 22 espressos, no problem*

*I made him promise not to buy any mortars this time*

We did manage quite a gathering at my parent’s property in southern Indiana for the eclipse. It was a wedding-like affair with a mix of rarely seen family and friends from all over. We set up a buffet on plywood and sawhorses in the garage and served a steady stream of food and desserts. We launched rockets that Jude and I had been building. We survived another of my father’s pyrotechnic extravaganzas. (A guy with a high threshold for fear, a knowledge of demolitions, and some connections at a firework warehouse is a force to be reckoned with). We killed time with bikes, onewheels, scooters, and even an old wheelchair that proved to be a surprisingly desirable mode of transportation on the long driveway between the house and the area we were camping.

*homeschool rocket factory; launch video below:*

My birthday gift for Tiffany this year involved facing some lifelong fears. As a child, I went to a small southern baptist church with my mother. I was always fairly gifted verbally, much to the aggravation of my Sunday school teachers who weren’t used to discussing the difference between a fetus and a baby with 11 year olds. The youth minister, Gary, approached my mother suggesting that I join the choir, assuming that my ability to make well-articulated sentences would translate into an equal capacity for making joyous noises for the Lord. I did have a little background in music; I played cello for the school orchestra and knew how to read music for the most part but I had never been a singing kid. I wasn’t even really a hummer. Maybe some idle whistling occasionally at best.

As an only child, social skills were not my forte and I never really got the knack of joining other groups of kids. I rolled into choir practice and stood behind an empty music stand with an open choir book and tried not to make eye contact. I knew that preteen kids can smell fear better than hound dogs. I tried to approach the thing like playing the cello and just sort of raise and lower my voice along with the notes on the page without really listening to what was going on around me; basically creating a scenario where an unknown pudgy oddball showed up and started yodeling for the lord for all he was worth.

I made it though the entire practice, but with an increasing awareness that something was amiss given the amount of unwanted attention that I was attracting. At the end of practice, the youth minister pulled me aside and told me, “Josh, perhaps there are other ways that you could best serve the Lord.” Despite my other oddities, I was a pretty practical child when it came to feedback; I crossed singing off the list of things that I did immediately and I didn’t look back. Like, ever.

*Chihully exhibit at Biltmore. More Birthmonth extravaganza*

This has resulted in me being a human that has never sang. I lip sync when people sing happy birthday. I never sing in the shower, the car, or ever at all. And it this point in life I get kinda sweaty and freaked out in situations where I’m expected to sing; and I associate with enough blissed-out grateful hippies that this comes up fairly frequently. We have some close friends who host large dinners and they gather around the table to sing before they eat. It’s terrifying; if they weren’t such good cooks I’d never make it through all the melodious eye contact. Imagine being invited to a dinner where the host said, “Alright, before dinner, we’re gonna go gather snakes and spiders with our bare hands on the edge of this precipice and take a quick swim in some sharky dark water,” and you’ll get sense of my quiet terror.

I do hate being scared of things and I do want to get better at being bad at things. In the past few years, I’ve signed up for singing lessons a few times and backed out each time. But given the import which, ahem, Fanny places on her birthday, I thought I might be able to harness the pressure of creating a unique present to force myself to buckle down and learn to sing with a goal of singing her a song on her birthday.

A brief digression: when Fanny and I decided to get married, I asked my friend Ryan to open our wedding ceremony with his trumpet. He had owned it for years and was ostensibly learning to play it despite never actually touching the thing. I thought the pressure might do him some good or at least provide me some entertainment. Before the ceremony began, he whispered to the remainder of the best men behind him, “I don’t care if the devil himself crawls out of this thing when I try to play it, you keep a straight face and act like it was part of the program.” His first attempt resulted in no sound at all; his second was a brief mournful squawk; the sound of a feeble goose dying, alone and unloved. The attendees maintained a respectful but uncomfortable silence in accordance with wedding norms and the best men’s eyes only watered a little in their mortal struggle for self control. Ryan’s fatalistic courage in the face of certain musical failure was my inspiration for walking into my first voice lesson.

I had called the most generic music lesson studio I could find. Like a lonely man who has given into the temptation of prostitution and realizes that the anonymity of Las Vegas would better suit his sins than his home town, I wanted a tawdry and generic venue for the abomination that was about to be unleashed from my larynx. I have tried singing a couple of times when no one was around; I even recorded it once to make sure that it really sounded as bad as I thought. On the recording, it was actually worse than I thought and I live in fear that the internet has preserved that recording somehow despite my best efforts to trample and erase it like a filthy tick.

Until now, I have largely kept my fear of singing a secret. I have found that, for people who can carry a tune, or who just don’t mind belting out their best effort, public singing seems like an irrational and easily conquered fear relative to most phobic terrors. As far as I can tell, my fear is most similar to the feeling that a lot of people experience with public speaking, something that causes me no stress at all. Waiting outside the room for my teacher, I had the doubly terrifying realization that I could easily hear the student currently in the room singing away. (As it turns out, this music studio primarily caters to children and generally the lobby is full of parents on laptops and nose-picking kids with drumsticks and violins) I began to sweat and, thanks to my fancy new fitness watch, I realized my heart rate was sky-rocketing.

I am now 4 months into lessons and I suspect my teacher probably has had to mention me to her therapist. My teacher, Abby, is a professional musician and I can only imagine what it’s like to have that level of talent and spend an hour a week watching someone struggle through “Lean on Me” for the 55th time and still end up turning it into a collection of B flats and adolescent voice breaking. As a physician, I’ve wondered if it would be appropriate to offer her a prescription for Valium to be taken before and after I arrive. She is a patient and encouraging human and I would fight off a bear for her at this point, just to make things even.

At first, I kept these lessons a secret, telling Fanny that I was taking guitar lessons, but that made practicing fairly difficult and after the first month I had to at least let the kids in on it so I could practice at home and in the car. Incidentally, Spotify now thinks that “Lean on Me” is my favorite song of all time and has been desperately recommending odd songs that it supposes a guy who likes 10,000 reggae songs and one soul song should enjoy. Somewhere a data center is overheating on my account. The kids took it well and did a good job covering for me even when I forgot to take my guitar to “guitar” lessons.

Eventually one night I did get up the courage to spring it on Fanny and sing for her. I had to pre-hydrate for the amount of sweating that I knew would be involved. It went well enough. It wasn’t profoundly musical but she appreciated the effort despite being initially mad that I had kept a secret from her. (Being married to a psychiatrist is like having someone add flood lights to the poorly organized and dusty warehouse of your heart. There’s no hiding something without enormous effort) “Lean on Me” has a few well written lyrics. “For no one can fill those of your needs that you won’t let show” is my favorite and some pretty solid marital advice to boot. It wasn’t the performance that I had imagined, but intention and vulnerability seem to go further than charisma and polish in this phase of life.

*“amidst maps and mushrooms, she found peace”*

Thankfully, I have moved on past “Lean on Me” and am working on a new song and playing guitar while I sing it. It amusingly baffles me that I can manage the care of 15-20 ER patients at once but strumming a guitar and singing at the same time feels about as doable as voting for an honest and capable politician. Recently, I did sing out loud at a restaurant where someone was suffering the tedious humiliation of having a birthday while dining out. No one seemed to notice that I was singing and my rate of perspiration only marginally increased.

Spring. It’s hard to keep up with. From distraction to distraction, my attention wanders like a butterfly in the breeze. Soon enough, the unblinking gaze of snakes and tourists will make Asheville’s town and country vibe concerningly predatory enough to warrant some time indoors. But for now, the manic pull of spring’s erupting flora demands all of my time.

Bugs, Math, God

Riparian